S4 Ep11 - Making Decisions When The Floor Is Lava

Subscribe to the Podcast

Hi there and welcome to this episode of the Structured Literacy Podcast, recorded here on the lands of the Palawa people of Tasmania.

I have the enormous privilege of talking with school leaders from around the country and working directly with schools. I don't for a single second take the trust that is given to me for granted, and I value so highly the opportunity to be a part of people's journeys. Seeing the tangible results they are achieving is so rewarding. I don't publish a list of schools who I work with or try to leverage that to build up my business, it just doesn't sit well with me.

But leaders and teachers who I've worked with directly, they know who they are, and I want to say that I have the hugest heart for you and the work you are doing. I also want to send some love in the direction of anyone currently working through the tricky task of making decisions for their first steps into structured literacy.

A few years ago things were harder, but also simpler. Harder because as a leader, you were often out on a limb on your own, fighting imposter syndrome while your principal colleagues talked excitedly about their writer's workshop and PM benchmark. I remember very clearly going to the principal's business days and being asked how my school's data was looking and what PM levels kids were up to. I was well prepared for the strange looks I got when I declared that we weren't doing PM benchmarks but were using a normed tool to assess reading. I knew enough to stand my ground and be comfortable going out on a limb. But many leaders weren't in this space yet, so life was harder for leaders wanting to make the change, because they had to really search for their tribe.

These days, the tide has shifted pleasingly, but not completely, and while I won't go so far as to say that every leader is comfortable in the structured literacy space it's certainly not the secret squirrel business that it used to be. But in one way, things were simpler back then too, because you didn't have what feels like a billion program options to choose from in making these changes.

When I wrote Reading Success in Action, my early years phonics program, to teach decoding, encoding and early sentence level skills, it was in response to feedback from teachers that there just wasn't an affordable, robust, evidence-informed option available to them. They wanted to grow practice but didn't have the thousands of dollars it was going to take to properly equip them in their classroom with the tools they needed to do so. So I sat down and wrote Reading Success in Action. I'm proud to say that many teachers and schools have adopted this as their chosen resource to structure phonics and decoding instruction and are getting wonderful results.

But a leader making the change these days has the curse of choice. Everywhere you turn, there are different options for teaching early years foundational skills of decoding and encoding, and each program does things slightly differently, with the claim that theirs is the best way.

When everyone is telling you that their approach is the best, most evidence-based one, and I have a huge issue with that claim by the way, what are you supposed to do?

When you are new into the structured, explicit teaching of literacy and are still growing your knowledge, what on earth are you supposed to do?

Our Pitfalls

Well, very often we reach out to someone who is slightly ahead of us in the journey to ask what they've done.

This leads us to our first pitfall in this game of the decision-making floor is lava.

Oh and, by the way, if you don't know what the game the Floor is Lava is all about, it's a children's game where they have to move from one piece of furniture to another, never touching the floor. If you touch the floor, you die. To make it more challenging and exciting, the game can begin with a cry of "the floor is lava" from someone in the room and then everyone has five seconds to make sure that they aren't touching the floor.

Bringing this back to our work of schools, we can see that it feels like someone has popped into your office and yelled "Old practices are lava. They're killing your students. You've got five seconds to choose something else." And that feeling, that huge sense of urgency and pressure to not be damaging children, to be moving with the times, to be responding to system mandates and political imperatives, can lead us to make poor decisions.

Here's why: when we're trying to make decisions on the fly, without the knowledge and experience to feel confident, we can make some big mistakes.

The first mistake is falling victim to the bandwagon effect. This psychological phenomenon has its origins in the mid-19th century in the United States, when political candidates would drive a wagon carrying a musical band down the street. People would say you should jump on the bandwagon to be successful. There's more to the story, but it's not particularly important in this conversation. The point is that the term jump on the bandwagon came to be used in a negative way, to indicate that someone was aligning themselves with an idea, person or practice, because of the perception of success, without really knowing what they were getting into. The bandwagon effect these days is about just that.

In education, it looks like following the advice or practices of someone or something because of the perception of success that this will bring to them. It plays out as everyone is using this program or working with this consultant or joining this group. Therefore it must be successful. If we do that, we'll be successful too. We think this and follow this path without knowing what would actually make that thing successful for us. And I'm not saying that the practice, person or program can't be successful, I'm simply saying that we don't know why we're choosing to adopt that path other than other people are doing it. Sometimes this even plays out when we have evidence that the thing that everyone is doing doesn't have the strongest evidence or impact or connection to research, and we saw this for years in the balanced literacy space.

There are two aspects of this. We are either really unsure about what to do and rely on the views of others, or we are really worried about the political ramifications of not following the crowd. And about politics? Let's just be honest about its impact on our decisions and our schools. I'm not just talking about politics in terms of the government, I'm really excited, as is everyone else, about the departments of education and systems moving to a structured approach. I'm talking about politics in terms of the underlying, subtle, sometimes toxic, always challenging expectations that exist in education.

I heard a definition of political conversation the other day that I really like it was:

A political conversation involves us carefully choosing our words and actions based on what we want another person to say, think or do.

So when we make a political decision, we're doing so because of what someone else is going to think of us and our leadership, not because we've carefully considered all angles of an issue or problem and arrived at a conclusion for our school.

The problem with bandwagon-based decisions is that you are always following someone else's lead. You are always on the back foot. You just can't be strategic because you don't know why you're doing what you're doing and what you are hoping for, those results that you've been striving for and promising people never happen. It just doesn't work, and I have to tell you, I think we're in danger of this happening in our schools right now, not just in single classrooms, not just in single schools, but in decisions that are being made for whole systems. It's not that the decisions themselves are poor. It's that we are making them without knowing why we're doing what we're doing.

One of the criticisms of the balanced literacy movement was that people followed along blindly with popular decisions. Another one was that personality-driven decisions were being made rather than evidence-based ones. That practices were widely implemented without due consideration of whether they were fully evidence-informed or not, and actions were implemented without knowing how to get the best out of them because we didn't have all of the background knowledge we needed.

In my view, this issue is one of the biggest threats to continued development of explicit and structured practice over the next five years. Now don't get me wrong, seeking the feedback of others can be incredibly helpful, especially if you know that they are on the same page as you, but please don't ask those questions in a Facebook group. You're only going to hear from people who either love the thing or hate the thing. The people who would jump in and comment will often sound very confident and very authorative, but that doesn't mean they know enough to be giving you a nuanced perspective. And now we have arrived at the next pitfall of making snap decisions because the floor is lava.

Relying on the opinion of others who are overconfident, or not asking enough questions because we are overconfident in our own knowledge and skills.

A few weeks ago, I shared a podcast episode about cognitive biases. One of these was the Dunning-Kruger effect, where people with the least knowledge are most likely to claim expertise. You can hear more about this bias and other reasons that traditional professional learning may not be getting you where you want to go in Season 4, Episode 6 of the podcast. It's crucial that we understand where the pitfalls are in decision making, and knowing about cognitive bias helps us with this. But after learning that people who know the least are the most likely to claim expertise, the next logical question is how do we know the difference between someone who really knows what they're claiming to know and someone who is misguided? How do we know whether we're in the wrong camp here?

The Signs

Well, there are some signs to look out for.

Firstly, the person will use a lot of catchphrases that sound credible, but they can't explain them. When pressed to explain what they mean, they'll share fairly shallow examples and refer to other authors or presenters, but not really explain why things are important. A person who is claiming deep knowledge but doesn't really have it won't be able to explain how different theories and models interact. They also won't be able to draw a line between the practice they're promoting and the research basis for them. They'll say things like "well, children should sound out". When prompted about why and who and in what circumstances, they might say "oh, but research says so". They might also be able to rattle off big names in the space, and they'll often make sweeping statements and express generalisations that don't reflect the complexity of addressing each school's context. They will also likely be inflexible in their thinking and refuse to consider any other opinion or possibility other than their own. They'll claim that what they're saying is applicable to every classroom or school, but won't have the experience to discuss how things can be adjusted to context.

When challenged to slow down and carefully consider alternative options, the person, and this applies more to people in schools than out of them, may become frustrated or even slightly aggressive. They won't want to engage in deep dialogue to evaluate options, because it will expose the somewhat shallow nature of their knowledge and the feelings of vulnerability that they are trying to keep private. And I'm not saying this to criticise the people themselves, they're not bad people, they don't have nefarious intent. But I'm sharing this simply so that you can know what to look out for if you're deciding whether someone actually has the expertise to make them a fully informed part of decision making.

Finally, someone who has fallen victim to the Dunning-Kruger effect and the illusions of explanatory depth will have trouble discussing when to do what. They'll have some declarative knowledge. They'll be able to run a lesson or manage a program in a familiar context, but won't be able to transfer this knowledge to respond to the complexity that inevitably arises when considering the wide array of context in schools and even between classrooms and students in our own school.

So we know that we should have nuanced, careful conversations about the choices we're making.

We know to be on the lookout for the bandwagon effect and to identify when someone might be speaking with an air of authority but not have the deep knowledge they claim.

But how does this help us actually make decisions about what to do?

Even armed with this information, it's still hard to make decisions about how to move forward in these crucial times.

My Suggestions

My first suggestion is to go slowly, but not too slowly. Choose low-cost options to dip a toe in the water of structured literacy.

Leaders of Resource Room schools have told me that having something simple and yet robust to give to their teams that covered every grade and every area of the literacy block lifted an enormous burden for them in moving their school forward. They didn't have to take the risk of spending tens of thousands of dollars. That made it all feel safer. They knew that ongoing professional learning was available inside the membership as an inclusion for everyone, meaning that they could avoid just throwing a program at their team, saying catch and hoping for the best. They knew that if they had questions, they could reach out and receive support. They knew that what they were providing to their team was strongly grounded in evidence and explicit teaching principles, but that their teachers could still be themselves in the classroom and respond to the needs of the students in front of them. They also knew that these simple steps were not the end of the story, but rather a gentle way to introduce their teams to structured literacy that was built on over time.

The most important bit about all of this was not that they had chosen the Resource Room, and there are these days many options to choose from.

• The most important bit was that these leaders could get started without a risky spend that they would have to be accountable for if things didn't go to plan.
• They could provide professional learning and support to their teams without relief teachers and closing the school.
• They could quickly establish common practices without removing teachers' capacity for responsive teaching.
• They could feel confident in how robust the resources were they were offering and they had access to the support they needed.

So that's my list for you to consider when making decisions for these crucial first steps into structured literacy. Now we'll link to a previous episode about getting ready for change that takes this conversation further, as well as a tool that you can download to help you critically and objectively evaluate phonics programs and practices in the show notes.

The hardest part of making decisions and reaching out to others is not knowing who or what to trust.

• How do you trust when everyone claims to have the best stuff?
• How do you trust when the people who are viewed as experts disagree about how to move forward?

I think that part of the answer is to understand and accept that getting a program is one of the first steps, but it's not the last one. And please don't think you will avoid uncertainty by writing your own program.

Creating lasting change for ever-improving results is about taking action, evaluating impact through data, tweaking and refining based on what you see, hey, then evaluating impact again based in the data, and then continuing to tweak and refine your processes until every child in the school is learning every day. And that's a long term undertaking.

No single program or resource can promise you that every child will learn just because you used it. No single program has the answer for every circumstance or every conceivable possibility. No program knows your school or your students. That's where you and your team come in. To do all of this refining and tweaking, we all need to grow knowledge of our profession so that we can become critical consumers of research and critical consumers of product.

Like it or not, whether something is freely available from a department of education, a not-for-profit organisation or you pay money for it, you are consuming products, and costs are counted in many more ways than dollars.

So before you invest money, time and emotional and physical energy into a new approach, make sure that you haven't fallen victim to the bandwagon effect. Make sure that the people you are taking advice from actually have robust enough knowledge to not be leading you down a garden path and know what is important to you as a school. Ask your team, ask your leaders, ask your parents and your students. What features and characteristics will help them feel supported? What does a reasonable path of development look like to them?

You'll ultimately make the decision, you need to it's not decisions by consensus and democratic vote, but if you want people to buy in and embrace your new journey, they need to have voice. Once you know what you're looking for, and remember we have that handy decision-making tool for you around phonics to help you, then critically evaluate your options, make objective decisions, be able to articulate your why and then act, knowing you'll be evaluating the impact on students all along the way and adjusting in response to what you see.

If you're measured in your decision making, if you start with principles and practices that are research aligned and not get caught up in deciding on the popularity of programs, if you get the feedback and buy-in of your team, and keep your eye very closely on student learning outcomes as the goal, you won't break the children. You also won't break yourself or your team. If there are decisions that are plaguing you, if you are stuck, email help@jocelynseamereducation.com and request a topic for a podcast episode.

I'm here to help, it's the whole reason that I do what I do. You've got this, it's going to be ok.

Keep an eye on what's important and know that there will never be a decision you make that doesn't come with some degree of imposter syndrome, some voice of Mildred in your head saying "well, no, you know everyone else has got it all together. You know you're about to wreck your school. You know this isn't going to work". We need to recognise that and accept that it's just part of the journey.

But fact check those thoughts, fact check the claims of everyone. Fact check those uncertainties and take measured steps and everything is going to be okay.

Until next time. Happy teaching, bye.

Related episodes

S4 Ep6 - Five Reasons that Traditional PL May Not Lead to Student Outcomes

S3 Ep 21 - Five Ways to Get Ready for the Coming Change

We are now taking bookings for the Semester 1, 2025 intake of Leading Learning Success. Due to the personalised nature of this program, places are limited. Submit your expression of interest here to avoid disappointment.